Just a Simple Way

All the good in me unlaced I pull what I own across the floor, books devoured to the spine, impressions the knees of my jeans have made of kneeling, my ghosts of ghosts, the saint who is namesake. I lay it out. A turtle can lay one hundred thirty-seven eggs in the hollows of trash-filled beaches and pray her young into the foam and I know how she judges her almost-gone with the shell’s first clean fracture, and how much she holds when she owns nothing and watches it race away. I line it up for you, lay it down, armfuls, fistfuls, incalculable catalogues of rinsed fingerprints released, as they are back-breaking, as this convex shell is enough, as the body becomes the loudest resonating home where I deadlock roomfuls of possessions, where my valuables belong so unbearably to me that they are not mine. And because I want to float I lay them down, the swatches of fabric, the memories of places I swore I had owned so wholly I felt them through to the relics, laid down, the hopes I hold for the ones I’d kill to own who swim between combs of aimless currents, of whom I am no owner, of what I am no mother I lay them out for you. And as the sea holds each embryo to the memory of one original shell, I am unforgivably enamored with the ownership of all.